On 9 March, students from Nottingham University and Nottingham Trent occupied the Coates Road auditorium at Nottingham Uni in solidarity with the University and College Union (UCU) strike, writes Reece Lawton, Nottingham University Socialist Students.

Non-fiction: Ahed Tamimi - a girl who fought back: On the morning of the last Sunday in July, Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi was released from an Israeli prison, where she had been for eight months since her arrest on 19 December 2017.

Israel/Palestine: Sixteen-year-old Ahed Tamimi and her 21-year-old cousin, Nur Tamimi, were arrested during a military raid on their house in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on the night of 19 December.

A standing ovation greeted Jeremy Corbin's pledges on housing at Labour's conference: to stop 'social cleansing' regeneration schemes and give residents a vote on regeneration proposals; to build more council homes and to control rents.

Israel/Palestine: The Strike of Freedom and Honour is the name given to an indefinite mass hunger strike of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, which started on Palestinian Prisoner Day, 17 April.

Discussion at Socialism conference in Tel Aviv: Just before Christmas the United Nations security council symbolically voted 14-0 declaring Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as illegal. A week earlier, Socialist Struggle Movement - the Israel/Palestine section of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) - hosted its annual Socialism conference in Tel Aviv.

Most mainstream media obituaries described Shimon Peres, the recently deceased former president of Israel, as a 'peacemaker statesman' who constrained the settlerist, nationalist policy of prime minister Netanyahu's rule. In reality, Peres was a wolf in sheep's clothing.